Posts Tagged ‘photography’

D. James Dee is trying to find a home for his incredible collection of 250,000 color transparencies and slides (35 mm to 8 x 10 inches) that capture 40 years of the modern New York art scene. Mr. Dee, a retired SoHo Photographer, documented artists, galleries, exhibitions, books and portfolios. The collection is extensive and its free. Minor problem: Mr. Dee didn’t label his slides.

Today is the 20th anniversary of the first photograph ever uploaded to the World Wide Web. And what a photo! Photoshop was clearly in its infancy as well. For the full story behind this historic image and the Cernettes who inspired it, check out the full article in Motherboard.

The Library of Congress recently announced the digitization of the Frances Benjamin Johnston lantern slide collection. Johnston (1864-1952) was a photographer and advocate of the garden beautiful movement. In support of this movement, Johnston toured the US and Europe during the 1910s and 1930s, presenting lectures on historic gardens and plant life. To illustrate these lectures, Johnston used her own images. She transfered 1,134 of her black and white photographs to lantern slides which she then hand-tinted so that she could illustrate her popular lectures for garden clubs, museums and horticultural societies in color. Johnston’s photographs depict more than 200 sites — primarily private gardens but also horticultural shows, a public library and museum, and several parks. The slides focus on the American East, West, and South but also include some images in Italy, France, and England.

The New York Times recently reported that applications developed by Apple for their mobile devices can access and copy user photo libraries. This bit of information was revealed shortly after it was reported that some apps were able to take user address books without their knowledge. Apps that utilize location data appear to also allow access to user photos. According to the NYT, it is uncertain if the Apple apps are illicitly copying user photos. To read the full story, go here.

The Department of History of Art and Architecture, Trinity College Dublin has developed an open-access resource for the study of medieval Irish architecture and sculpture called Gothic Past. Funded by the Irish Research Council for the Humanities and Social Sciences (IRCHSS), it highlights three major photograph research collections at Trinity College: the Stalley Collection, the Edwin Rae Collection and the Moulding Profiles Collection. The images making up Gothic Past have been a primary resource for investigations carried out as part of Reconstructions of the Gothic Past, a thematic research project carried out in the Department of History of Art and Architecture at Trinity College from 2008 -2011. The project monograph will be published in 2012 by Wordwell Books.

The New York Public Library has just released a new tool — the Stereogranimator — that can transform historical stereographs into shareable 3D web formats. Stereoscopic photography recreates the illusion of depth by presenting two offset images separately to the left and right eye of the viewer. The 2D images are merged in the brain, creating the perception of 3D depth. The Stereogranimator allows users to select a stereoscope from the 40,000+ stereographs from NYPL’s archive and produce an anaglyph or animated gif that combines the two images into one.
For more on the stereographs and how they work, check out the Getty’s simulation.

Magnum Photos is looking for a few good taggers — 50 taggers to be exact — to participate in some crowd-source photo tagging. Hoping to make its archives more accessible, and take advantage of the fact that many of us spend too much time in front of our computers, Magnum Photos is initiating a collaborative annotation project and is looking for volunteer taggers who love photography and want to help shape its site into an online community. At present, Magnum has 500,000 images online but only 200,000 have information attached to them. If you’re interested in participating, you can sign up now to become a Magnum tagger. (source: James Estrin, “Crowd-Sourcing the Magnum Archive,” Lens, July 26, 2011)

The Getty Foundation and the Royal Institute for Cultural Heritage have released high resolution images of Jan Van Eyck’s Ghent Altarpiece taken while the work was undergoing conservation in 2010. The project utilized high resolution macro photography under visible and infrared light, infrared reflectoography, X-radiography and dendrochronolgy to reveal valuable information on underdrawing, layer paint layer structure and other technical aspects of the altarpiece. Additional images of the conservation project will be made available over the next year.

Wish you could see what your favorite neighborhood in your favorite city looked like at the turn-of-the-century? A new collaborative project called SepiaTown can make that possible. SepiaTown a project that allows registered users to upload historical photographs of their favorite city, index them to Google Maps and show you a “then and now” picture of your favorite city. The makers of SepiaTown think of it as “a time machine. SepiaTown lets you use your computer or mobile device to see what the very spot you’re standing on looked like decades or centuries ago.” Registered SepiaTown users (anyone can register) can upload, map, and share historical images (film and audio coming soon) from any given location and time period with other users around the world. SepiaTown is free and content is completely user generated.